On the night of October 10, 1946 — the auspicious occasion of Kojagori Lakshmi Puja, when Bengali Hindus across undivided Bengal were immersed in worship and light — the quiet of Noakhali was shattered. In the southeast of Bengal, where Hindus were already an embattled minority, organized Muslim League forces led by local leaders suddenly descended on Hindu villages. What followed was not spontaneous communal rioting but the execution of a systematic, planned campaign of terror: arson, massacre, rape, forcible conversion and the coerced eating of beef — all instruments of humiliation and annihilation directed at a single community (Noakhali 1946).
Contemporary newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts paint a grim picture. The October 23, 1946 edition of Amrita Bazar Patrika reported that for thirteen days some 120 villages across Ramganj, Lakshmipur, Raipur, Begumganj and Senbag police stations in Noakhali — home to nearly 90,000 Hindus — along with another 70,000 people in neighboring Chandpur and Faridganj in Tippera (Comilla) district, were besieged by hooligans. The paper warned that death stared the inhabitants in the face and urged immediate military relief. The Statesman, on October 16, 1946, described roughly 200 square miles in which inhabitants were being massacred, houses burned, women carried away and thousands coerced into conversion; districts’ police and civil administration, the paper charged, took no preventive action (Noakhali 1946).
According to multiple sources, including British relief workers and later historians, the Noakhali carnage appears to have been driven in part by a desire for revenge. The “Great Calcutta Killing” in August 1946 — initiated by brutal assaults on Muslim neighborhoods but followed by catastrophic Hindu reprisals — inflamed passions across communities. Local Islamist leaders in Noakhali, notably Golam Sarowar (also spelled Golam Sarwar) and Khasem Ali, seized on that anger. A rabble-rousing speech by Golam Sarowar at Begumganj bazaar on October 10 exhorted Muslims to kill “kafirs” and idolaters and to fulfill their religious duty — rhetoric that, historians say, catalyzed mass violence.
The brutality was methodical and ritualized. Villages were attacked in coordinated waves; thousands of Hindus were reported killed, while tens of thousands more fled to relief camps in neighboring districts such as Comilla, Chandpur and even across borders. Estimates circulating at the time and in later retellings suggest roughly 5,000 Hindus were murdered and between 50,000 and 75,000 sought refuge — figures scholars still debate, but which convey the scale of the calamity. Women suffered especially horrific fates: widespread gang rape, forced marriages to their attackers, forced consumption of beef as a sign of coerced apostasy, and public stripping of markers of Hindu identity such as sindur in an act intended to disgrace and sever victims from community and faith.
Individual episodes bring home the cruelty and the courage of those days. On October 11, Golam Sarowar’s militia attacked the home of Rajendralal Raychaudhuri — president of the Noakhali Bar Association and of the Hindu Mahasabha district committee — where he and other family members defended the house bravely. Raychaudhuri used a rifle to hold off attackers; he later sent several family members to safety. The following day, a larger force returned, slaughtering twenty-two members of the household, including Rajendralal and two of his brothers. In a barbaric act, the attackers are said to have severed Rajendralal’s head and presented it to Golam Sarowar. Women of the Raychaudhuri family were distributed among the Islamic fighters.
On October 12 in Shayestanagar (within Raipur police limits), Chittaranjan Datteraychaudhuri — temporarily in Kolkata but summoned home for the Lakshmi Puja by his elderly mother — gathered his family on the roof and armed himself with a single rifle to resist the attackers. When defeat became certain, unable to see his family captured and dishonored, he reportedly killed his elderly mother and children, and then ended his own life. These are not merely sensational anecdotes; they are the recorded testimonies that survivors, relief workers and contemporary journalists collected amid the wreckage.
Muriel Lester, a British relief worker who witnessed conditions in Noakhali, focused on the fate of women: “Worst of all was the plight of women. Several of them had to watch their husbands being murdered and then be forcibly converted and married to some of those responsible for their death. Those women had a dead look. It was not despair, nothing so active as that. It was blackness… the eating of beef and declaration of allegiance to Islam has been forced upon many thousands as the price of their lives.”
Relief efforts emerged from multiple quarters. Leela Ray, a noted freedom fighter and social worker, reportedly rescued more than 400 abducted Hindu women before Mahatma Gandhi’s arrival. Yet Gandhi’s widely publicized visit to Noakhali later in 1946 — intended to restore peace and repair communal bonds — did not fully halt the violence or prevent the long-term consequences. Journalists who accompanied him noted how many of the attacked and converted Hindus lived in inhuman conditions, many uncertain of their fate and identity. Leaders such as Shyama Prasad Mukherjee provided letters of reassurance to the traumatised, helping some to relocate to safer zones; these documents were instrumental in enabling many to leave the worst-affected areas.
Noakhali did not happen in a vacuum. The article’s Bengali source links the 1946 violence to a longer trajectory that eroded the position of Bengali Hindus in the subcontinent. It traces earlier political steps — the Communal Award (1932), repressive laws and communalized politics of the 1930s, and administrative decisions that sidelined Hindu symbols from public institutions — as contributing causes. In East Bengal and later in what became East Pakistan, the text lists an alarming litany of massacres, pogroms and persecutions across decades: Barisal, Bheirab Bridge, Gola Ghat, Naria, Sankharikathi, Ishan Gopalpur, Dakra, Jatibanga, Makalkandi, Shatnikhil, Galimpur, Adityapur, Sutrapur, Sendia, Kaliganj, Koraikadipur and Chuknagar; and later state-sponsored oppression between 1989–92, the 2001 violence, and post-2014 incidents after the Shahbagh movement. The cumulative effect, the text argues, has been to render Bengali Hindus a beleaguered community in a region once considered one of their cultural strongholds.
That sense of an existential slide — from the confident Bengali Hindu society of the late 19th century to a community that faces repeated persecution and marginalization — provoked an uncompromising conclusion in the Bengali original: the need for an assertive, uncompromising and self-interested Bengali Hindu nationalism. Citing the words of Acharya Debaprasad Ghosh, a former president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the author describes a fleeting wave of self-awareness in the Hindu Bengali community that was later drowned in complacency and utopian pursuits (e.g., socialism and abstract notions of democracy). The warning is stark and repetitive: “If you wish to survive, guard your house.”
This call to arms is both political and existential: the Bengali text demands the creation of durable institutions and a clear ideological framework dedicated to protecting Hindu religion, language and economic interests — a formalized nationalism that would not be content with moral appeals alone but would pursue tangible safeguards for a vulnerable community.
A sober historical reading of Noakhali — and of the successive episodes of communal violence that the Bengali original catalogs — forces several observations that matter for our collective memory and for democratic politics:
Planned violence leaves lasting scars. The Noakhali events were not merely spontaneous eruptions; multiple sources identify organized leaders, directed militias and methods (forced conversion, sexual violence, hunger blockade) that indicate a campaign aimed at erasing a community’s presence and identity.
Victims are often women and the powerless. Testimonies like Muriel Lester’s remind us that women suffer not only bodily violence but social erasure — forced marriages, loss of community and the stigma that follows survivors.
State and administrative failures amplify catastrophe. Contemporary newspaper accounts criticized local law enforcement and civil authorities for inaction — a pattern seen in many communal conflagrations where official impotence, bias or complicity turns a local flare-up into an ethnic cleansing.
Memory matters. What is recorded, preserved and taught shapes whether such violence becomes a warning for future generations or a suppressed trauma that festers. The Bengali narrative calls for institutional memory and political organization as defensive tools.
Calls for militant political organization must be handled with care. The Bengali source frames an uncompromising nationalist response as necessary for survival. While marginalized communities do require protection, any advocacy for militant or exclusionary politics must be weighed against democratic values, human rights, and the reality that violence begets more violence.
Noakhali’s horrors and the subsequent migrations changed the demography, psyche and politics of Bengal. For historians, activists and citizens alike, the imperative is twofold: to preserve the truth of what happened — the names, the testimonies, the dates — and to seek remedies within the rule of law that protect minorities’ rights and dignity. Remembering Noakhali is not simply an exercise in historical commemoration; it is a warning about how quickly communal animus, political opportunism and administrative failure can combine into human catastrophe — and a summons to build institutions and social norms that prevent a repeat.
& finally they brought home the destiny – Hindu homeland of West Bengal
1946 THE GREAT CALCUTTA KILLINGS & NOAKHALI GENOCIDE
Animitra Chakraborty
